Authorship of "Dreams": The Bottom Line

I and others (in particular Jack Cashill) have raised questions about whether Barack Obama is actually the author of Dreams from My Father, as one would think from the book's cover. But why should anyone care? Lots of people don't.

It's safe to say that questions about the authorship of Dreams might never have been raised if Obama had not received the Democratic nomination for the presidency. And if it were shown that Obama didn't write Dreams, or even that there were serious reasons to doubt it, the candidate might lose some trust and some votes. Still, the authorship of Dreams has significance in ways not directly related to the election, and not directly related to how members of the public form opinions about Barack Hussein Obama's personal integrity as politician and author. It's not fundamentally political, much less partisan.

Dreams from My Father is a publication of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House. Paperback copies retail at $14.95 U.S. and $16. 95 Canadian. Copies are sold in other countries too, and I have no doubt that Dreams has been translated into quite a few languages. According to Peter Osnos of the Century Foundation (follow the link and search for "Barack Obama and the Book Business"), who as an executive of Times Books at Random House was the original publisher of Dreams, by 2006 about 500, 000 copies of the book had been sold. Neither Osnos nor anyone else doubts that the explosive sales of Dreams were a direct result of the political prominence of its putative author, Barack Obama: the single most commercially valuable feature of the product is Barack Obama's name on the cover. Given Obama's continued political rise, it would be fair to guess that sales of Dreams have already exceeded a million copies and may eventually be counted in multiples of millions. According to Osnos's estimate, by 2006 the royalties accruing to Obama and his agent, Jane Dystel, had already reached about $1 million.

Dreams from My Father is a multi-million dollar, profit-making sales operation. The revenue it has generated comes from consumers who have paid for the books and derivative products such as the audio version read by Barack Obama. Since the attractiveness of the Dreams product line to consumers is substantially based upon Random House's representation of U.S. Senator Barack Obama as the author of Dreams, if Obama is not actually the author, then Random House and Barack Obama have collected and are continuing to collect millions of dollars from consumers under false pretenses. Such a lucrative commercial fraud, or even the reasonable suspicion of one, would demand the attention of a judge, whatever voters might happen to think about candidate Obama, or about President Obama if he were elected.

There are many reasons to doubt the integrity and truthfulness of candidate Obama--and that's putting it cautiously. The discovery that Obama was not the author of Dreams would add another item to the roster of his lies about himself, and the discovery that the real author was William Ayers would add another item to the roster of lies Obama has told about his relationship with Ayers. His lie about the authorship of Dreams would perhaps be exceptionally important as the most elaborate lie, but it also might seem less important because it would be one of the oldest. If it's a matter of how individual Americans evaluate Obama's personal integrity, or his suitability to the presidency, the weight that the new discovery might add to impressions of Obama's dishonesty could ultimately be as meaningless as the weight his smooth performances on TV add to popular impressions of his honesty.

But behind the authorship of Dreams from My Father there is a matter of fact that, whether it ever becomes public or not, is what it is and not what Jack Cashill's arguments make it. Somebody did write Dreams and that writer either was Barack Obama or someone else whose name has much less commercial value than Obama's. Random House has represented Obama as the author of Dreams, and on that basis the company has collected and continues to collect millions of dollars in sales from consumers. Consumers who doubt that Random House has delivered the advertised product have, in principle, a right to have their complaint heard in court, and Random House and Obama have a right to produce whatever evidence they can to prove that Barack Obama was indeed the author of the product sold under his name. It is not my responsibility, nor is it any other blogger's, to accuse Barack Obama of wrongdoing or to acquit him, to prove that Obama didn't write Dreams, or to prove that he did. We have procedures of due process for investigating and deciding matters like this, and they should be followed.

At the present time Random House and Barack Obama have produced no evidence supporting Obama's authorship of Dreams beyond the mere assertion. On the other hand, there is considerable circumstantial evidence indicating that Obama did not write Dreams. As I have pointed out in a previous post, this evidence includes the Introduction and 2004 Preface to Dreams, which curiously narrate the book's genesis without ever stating that Obama wrote it, and in other respects offer a self-contradictory account that is not plausible enough in itself to support an implied claim of authorship, and only plausible to any degree if, as the Introduction actually says, Dreams was written in some other way (which would necessarily have been by somebody else, although the Introduction artfully leaves that implication unclear). Moreover, Jack Cashill has assembled stylistic evidence indicating that William Ayers had at least a significant hand in writing Dreams, and while by its very nature this evidence cannot be fully conclusive, it is sufficient to justify the suspicions of a reasonable person.

That being the case, I think (and I speak here as a non-lawyer) it would be appropriate for at least one state attorney general to initiate an investigation of the authorship of Dreams with a view to a possible filing against Random House and Obama on behalf of the consumers in the attorney general's state. With the matter removed from the web to a court, we would be able to consider not only Cashill's stylistic analysis, my clever deconstruction of the Preface and Intro to Dreams, and other similar evidence, but also any evidence that Random House and Obama wished to produce in their own defense. I'm the last person to want to deny them the opportunity, or to want any innocent person to be falsely accused.

Of course, documents and testimony entered in evidence for a court would be affirmed as truthful under oath. And witnesses, such as William Ayers, Obama's agent Jane Dystel, his editor Henry Ferris, and Obama himself, might be examined under subpoena. But that's nothing they should worry about if the things that Cashill and others are saying about the authorship of Dreams are merely empty and malicious speculation. We doubters have put our cards on the table. It now looks like Obama who's bluffing.